The Entrepreneur’s Essentials #20: Capture the history of your amazing journey
For this lesson from The Entrepreneur’s Essentials, I’m in a very reflective mood today. So I want to revisit a simple lesson — one that is easier to live today than any other I’ll share in this ebook. It is all about the importance of taking photos along the way in your entrepreneurial journey. When you look back on these photos, especially after you’ve accomplished a lot in your journey, you’ll remember them like you would a beautiful vacation that you had with your family.
At data.world, we’ve had powerful camera “phones” since our beginning in 2015. So, taking photos has been easy. And I’ve made sure to set the tone as our CEO by sharing these in our #history channel in Slack. It was one of the first channels we created in Slack, and it is really amazing to go back to the beginning of our journey and see the historical journal that has been captured since. There are many gems in there, including a screen capture of the texts I sent to Matt Laessig and Jon Loyens asking them if they would like to brainstorm ideas with me (thankfully they said yes, and then Bryon Jacob, our fourth co-founder, got involved pretty quickly after and has been an amazing addition to our founding team). Some of these photos I’ve shared publicly, as I did on my one-year, two-year, and three-year summary posts since we came out of stealth and went live on July 11, 2016.
So here we go with this lesson from The Entrepreneur’s Essentials. It was first shared at Lucky7 on May 7, 2013. I hope this simple lesson motivates you to immediately starting documenting your journey if you haven’t already. As the founder or CEO, your team will mimic your behavior and you’ll build a better, more soulful company because of it. I made a few edits to the original post below, mostly in the area of readability (not in substance of content):
If you want to build a strong company culture, then you should care about the people in your company almost as much as you do family. That was my goal at Bazaarvoice as our CEO (read #14: Seven lessons learned on the journey from founder to CEO), and I deeply thought about how our family showed that we care about each other. One thing we are particularly good at in our personal lives is taking photos while we are on vacation. My wife, Debra, is particularly good at this and meticulously puts together photo books after each vacation, which we very much cherish. We want to document the very important time we spend together, and we know that our children will only be this age once. This is a natural practice for most families, especially those with young kids (as their appearance changes so much from year to year).
So why should it be different for companies? After all, you are on a very important journey together. Your company journey is your livelihood — it gives you the means of having other journeys, such as vacation time with your family (you may want to read my Lucky7 post on what Benjamin Franklin could have meant meant when he said, “time is money”). You are doing something that many others may say is “impossible”. It is no different than preparing for that climb to Mt. Kilimanjaro, which a few brave souls from Bazaarvoice recently completed to raise money for an important cause. Of course they took a lot of photos — it was the journey of a lifetime and they wanted to remember all of it. Shouldn’t it be the same for companies? Isn’t that a journey worth remembering? Brant Barton, my Bazaarvoice co-founder, and I thought so, and we took a lot of photos along the way. So did great people like Oliver Wong, Tung Huynh, and Nishant Pithia. Brant and I owe a lot to those three for selflessly spending so much of their time at company events to take photos. And, as our CEO, I encouraged them to take more every chance I got.
And when you take these photos along the way, something magical happens. And it isn’t all that different from what happens when you come back from your family vacation and put together that all-important photo book. You look back at your vacation and you remember it being even better than you thought it was when you were there, don’t you? The magic is that you start to care about the journey more than you ever have. And the entire company will model you in this regard. You get a real sense of creating legacy together. And as you achieve new milestones — as your “baby” (in this case the infant company) grows up into a “child” (the young company) and finally a “young adult” (the public company that Bazaarvoice is today) — you have so many photos to look back on and remember “the way it was”. A note of caution, though. As the CEO, you cannot just reminisce about the past — you also always need to be celebrating the best of the present and looking towards the future. The whole journey matters, not just the journey as an infant and child. You are always creating memories and for those that just joined your company, their journey is just beginning.
The most popular optional presentation in Bazaarvoice’s history was the history presentation that Brant gave. The room was always packed, standing-room only. And the slideshow was full of photos, and the many stories of the Bazaarvoice infant and child journey along the way. Why packed? Because people that are on the journey with you want to have a sense of its origins. Where you start often leads to where you end up. And I believe there is an entrepreneur in all of us here in America, as I wrote about in #9: How, and why, to ask for help.
So treat your company like you would your family. You don’t have to love it like you love your spouse or your children — that, frankly, isn’t the right way to look at it and family is forever. But you should love it immensely and you should model the same practices you have as a family to nourish the soul of your company. A good best practice as the founder is to try to remember to take your camera — now even easier with mobile phones having such high quality cameras built in — out every day and take a few photos. And be explicit with everyone in your company about why you are doing so. Tell them that you want to remember this time in the company’s history forever. That you will cherish these memories, and you hope they do too. That the journey is what counts the most, and you will not take it for granted. That everything in life — money, fame, or whatever — is not in the same league as the journey. That when you are much older and looking back at the life you lived, you’ll remember the journey the most. Founders: cherish the journey, respect it, document it.
To close, I have two photos to share with you. One is from my Bazaarvoice blog post celebrating 1,000 client brands (from 2010, five years into our journey back then), and it is the oldest photo I have of me and Brant starting Bazaarvoice together. It was taken in May of 2005 in David Powell’s (now named Bridgepoint Consulting) office space in Austin. Bob Smith and Gerry Bula were kind enough to give me and Brant three months of free “incubator” space back then (there was no Capital Factory, Incubation Station, Tech Ranch Austin, or Dreamit Austin back then — I wrote about the state of tech entrepreneurship in Austin in this Lucky7 post).
And the other is the most beautiful photo that I saw Nishant post on his recent climb to the peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro with other great Bazaarvoice folks.
Revisiting this lesson makes me more committed than ever to make sure to continue to practice this at data.world. I need to do a better job and have missed a few key moments recently. How about you? Do you already practice documenting the journey at your startup? What are your most cherished photos and memories so far? Do you need to recommit to this simple practice?
Note: this was originally posted on my blog at Lucky7.io, where I’ve been writing about primarily entrepreneurship since 2012. The original post is here, along with an interesting comments thread from five years ago.
